The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Computing devices have long utilized light-emitting diodes (“LEDs”) as visual indicators to report status information. For example, in network devices such as switches or routers, it is common to associate an LED with each physical interface of the network device. When a physical connection is active, the LED associated with that interface is typically lit. In some devices, the color of the LED may vary depending on the speed of the physical connection (e.g. orange for 100 Mbps versus green for 1 Gbps). In some devices, the LED may flash rapidly whenever there is network activity over the associated physical connection. In other devices, there may be more than one LED associated with a port—one that indicates the existence of a physical connection, and another that flashes whenever there is activity over the network connection. Similarly, a device may have a power LED that indicates power being supplied to the device, or an LED that flashes or changes colors to indicate the existence of an error condition.
However, the amount of information conveyed using such indicators has conventionally been very limited. For example, in the context of network devices, simple awareness of the existence of a physical connection or network activity over that connection is of limited benefit in a data center equipped with hundreds or thousands of such devices. To access information such as utilization and congestion statistics, a network device may therefore further include any of a number of types of remote interfaces accessible over a network, such as web interfaces or command-line interfaces, by which a network administrator may access the information. Locating and accessing such interfaces can often be cumbersome for a network administrator, and it is often not immediately discernable which physical device is associated with which remote interface.
Moreover, complex computing devices are often comprised of a number of components manufactured by different entities. Often, the component that has information to report is manufactured by an entity other than the entity responsible for integrating LED indicators into the device. For example, it is common in network devices for one company to produce chips responsible for implementing network switching functionality (e.g. including managing traffic that enters and/or leaves the device over physical ports), while a different company may be responsible for integrating the chip into a system that includes other components such as a general-purpose processor and an array of LEDs that is integrated into the system housing.
Utilization of LED indicators in such complex devices requires time-consuming coordination between entities, involving device-specific and/or proprietary communications between system components and the LED indicators. Consequently, utilization of LED indicators is typically limited to reporting a small set of standard items of information. Moreover, reporting by LED indicators often comes at the expense of increased (and undesirable) utilization of a general-purpose processor to process raw status information and convert that information into a data format suitable for driving the LED indicators.